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Which is now FOSS and badly needs to be revived: https://github.com/SymbianSource https://github.com/SymbianSource

tombert 2y ago
I had no idea that this happened. I would love there to be a spiritual successor the awesome N900. I guess you could argue that that's kind of what Android is, and that would be fair (you can do a lot of Linuxey stuff with Termux and the like), but I dunno, I think I'd still like something that feels a bit more like "a computer"
grishka 2y ago
Did anyone ever manage to build these sources? The only information about them I could find is lots of news from 2010 that "Symbian is now open source, yay".
- lproven 2y ago
  I've talked to some people about it. Various members of the final teams to work on it are out there and occasionally comment. I think it needs MS VC++, 32-bit, running on Win XP and nothing later, IIRC. But saying that, that should not be hard to obtain these days. The XP activation algorithm has been cracked; it's easy to build a working XP Pro VM now. I suspect, but do not know, that there's a fair amount of legacy stuff in Symbian that could be junked now. Nobody is really going to care about backwards compatibility and compatibility with 20-year-old phone apps. It had, what, 4-5 different UI layers available, I think? * S60 for portrait touchscreen phones with a few physical buttons and a numeric keypad. * S80 for landscape phones with QWERTY. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Series_80_(software_platform) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Series_80_(software_platform) * S90 for toushcreen-only phones, derived from Psion EIKON. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Series_90_(software_platform) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Series_90_(software_platform) * UIQ for portrait touchscreen-only phones. * MOAP for Japanese phones Junk all but one, or even them all if necessary, and find something that can bridge it to some kind of modern FOSS toolkit. Get it building for Raspberry Pi with GCC or LLVM, while 32-bit Arm is still cheap.

I had no idea that this happened. I would love there to be a spiritual successor the awesome N900. I guess you could argue that that's kind of what Android is, and that would be fair (you can do a lot of Linuxey stuff with Termux and the like), but I dunno, I think I'd still like something that feels a bit more like "a computer"

grishka 2y ago

Did anyone ever manage to build these sources? The only information about them I could find is lots of news from 2010 that "Symbian is now open source, yay".

lproven 2y ago
I've talked to some people about it. Various members of the final teams to work on it are out there and occasionally comment. I think it needs MS VC++, 32-bit, running on Win XP and nothing later, IIRC. But saying that, that should not be hard to obtain these days. The XP activation algorithm has been cracked; it's easy to build a working XP Pro VM now. I suspect, but do not know, that there's a fair amount of legacy stuff in Symbian that could be junked now. Nobody is really going to care about backwards compatibility and compatibility with 20-year-old phone apps. It had, what, 4-5 different UI layers available, I think? * S60 for portrait touchscreen phones with a few physical buttons and a numeric keypad. * S80 for landscape phones with QWERTY. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Series_80_(software_platform) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Series_80_(software_platform) * S90 for toushcreen-only phones, derived from Psion EIKON. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Series_90_(software_platform) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Series_90_(software_platform) * UIQ for portrait touchscreen-only phones. * MOAP for Japanese phones Junk all but one, or even them all if necessary, and find something that can bridge it to some kind of modern FOSS toolkit. Get it building for Raspberry Pi with GCC or LLVM, while 32-bit Arm is still cheap.